David Amsden

OK, I know, that analogy is a stretch, though it’s the one that comes to my mind as I stare, feeling faintly prophetic, at this recent headline in the New York Times: “Use of Attention-Deficit Drugs Is Found to Soar Among Adults.” The article points out that a new study, by Medco Health Solutions, reveals that use of ADD medications has doubled in those between the ages of 20 and 44 in the past four years. Why’s that? Likely in part because the first heavily medicated generation of teens is now drifting into adulthood and still renewing their prescriptions, and partly because new diagnoses are steadily increasing. “Adult ADD” — full name: attention deficient and hyperactivity disorder — appears to be at the cusp of making the transition of so many psychosocial disorders before it: from unheard of to skeptically acknowledged to culturally sanctioned.

Earlier this year it was the subject of a sober cover story in the New York Times Magazine, after which, curiously, television advertisements for Strattera, Eli Lilly’s drug for adult ADD, suddenly seemed impossible to avoid. Robert S. Epstein, Medco’s chief doctor, tells the Times that the current data indicates “a clear recognition and new thinking that treatment for A.D.H.D. does not go away for many children after adolescence.” Another doctor, James McGough of UCLA, adds that still more adults should be on such drugs — a sentiment echoed a few days later on the “Today” show by Dr. Edward Hallowell, author of “Delivered From Distraction: Getting the Most Out of Life With Attention Deficit Disorder.”

Is it me, or is there something peculiar going on here? Adults have taken what began as a controversial adolescent disorder and coolly co-opted it as their own, as if there were never any doubts about its legitimacy. In the ’70s, when ADD drugs were first being tested, they were among the only psychotropic meds for which clinical trials involved children and teens first. The thinking was simple: The adolescent years are ones of hormonal pandemonium that make focusing on pre-calc next to impossible for many; pills like Ritalin eased the pain. In time such reasoning was applied to younger kids — twitchy, foot-tapping 7- and 8-year-olds, too. As for adults? It was assumed that growing up meant, well, growing up, and that taking such pills would be viewed as a frowned-upon crutch. But today’s revised attitude has it that the trouble one had with memorizing state capitals or grasping the quadratic formula may be similar to the trouble one has listening to that PowerPoint presentation. We are all — or many of us are, potentially — antsy kids spaced out in the back of the class.

How fitting.

We live in a society where it’s increasingly difficult to differentiate between adults and kids. Go to a mall, squint your eyes, and see if you can tell the difference between the alarming 18-year-olds who seem 35 and the much more alarming 35-year-olds trying to pass for 18. A case can be made that recognizing adult ADD isn’t so much an enlightened leap in Western medicine as a questionable evolution in a culture that recently welcomed the dubious word “adultescent” into the 2005 edition of Webster’s New World College Dictionary. (This, on the heels of “teensploitation,” made official in 2004.) More than anything, Medco’s findings can be thought of as a small step toward the reinvention of how we view adulthood. Since time immemorial grown-ups have made a point of telling children that adulthood isn’t easy — that it’s a constant exercise in (cue affectedly furrowed brows) doing things you don’t want to do. But such preaching suddenly sounds archaic, doesn’t it, when the same adult superpowers are now patting themselves on the back for acknowledging that those PowerPoint presentations may, like Pink Floyd’s “The Wall,” be a whole lot more palatable on drugs?

I don’t mean to sound overly flip. I’m simply finding it hard not to see this as a tragicomic step toward the classic concern about psychotropic drugs: the redefining of life as a disorder. Think, for a moment, about antidepressants. Over the past decade they shifted from being adult-only drugs to being acceptably prescribed (off-label) to children and teens. How come? On one hand it was recognized that children suffered from serious depression, and that certain pills were remarkably effective treatments. But at the same time the definition of treatable depression was watered down — renamed as social anxiety disorder, panic disorder and, my personal favorite, generalized anxiety disorder — to include a seemingly endless demographic of adults and children. So the same way we recognized that adult disorders can be applied to children, we are now, with ADD, noting that those of childhood can be applied to adults. It makes it hard not to imagine a future in which the smallest hardships (trouble studying, stress over a breakup, or perhaps a desire to prevent such nuisances) lead seamlessly to a fully medicated existence starting well before the onset of adulthood.

If this sounds a tad too Huxleyian, consider this: Another recent Medco study points out that during the same period in which adult prescriptions for ADD medications doubled, there was an 85 percent increase in sleeping pill prescriptions for teens. The cause? No one knows for sure, but the most popular theory is that it just might have something to do with all those stimulants kids are being fed to focus on that test. “It leads you to wonder,” Dr. Epstein tells the Times, “whether these children are being treated for insomnia caused by hyperactivity or whether the medication itself causes insomnia.” It also leads you to wonder, Dr. Epstein, if medication to medicate the effects of medication is what we’ll soon be touting as medical advances. Or, more pressingly, if we truly gain anything but superficial relief by continuing to believe the reason for the increased popularity of these drugs is to treat disorders as opposed to enhancing performance.

It’s hip to pronounce today’s world as increasingly pressurized and achievement-oriented, to say we live in a time that’s “more competitive than ever,” and so forth. Time magazine recently polled 501 13-year-olds, and 67 percent were positive, just positive, despite any real evidence, that being young is harder today than it was when their parents were kids. Ask 501 45-year-olds the same question and I’ll bet you’ll get the same answer for the same socially masochistic reasons that prompt people to slap “Life’s a Bitch and Then You Die” bumper stickers on their cars. No doubt being a kid has changed in the past decade or so: Childhood is more micromanaged, more tuned in to the potential of dire consequences, less about play, more about work — in short, more adultlike. But I have trouble buying into the sepia-toned myth that it was “easier” or “simpler” to be either a kid or an adult in, say, the ’40s and ’50s. The shift is in how we perceive life’s trials: Dealing with them head-on used to be virtuous; now chemically vaporizing them is.

But must it be only one or the other? It seems especially stubborn — dare I say immature — that the medical community refuses to acknowledge just how much certain psychotropic drugs blur the line between the biochemical and societal. Even more peculiar is that while we usher in a state of being permanently medicated, selective dosing is still viewed as “recreational” and “risky.” What’s interesting about ADD drugs is that they are remarkably effective regardless of how your brain looks when scanned, achieving what for centuries we’ve turned to coffee to accomplish, with about the same potential for side effects. So here’s a radical thought: Why not just put them in the same category? After all, what’s worse, continuing to find ways to define the everyday in terms of disorders until we’re all taking pills to curb the effects of other pills, or admitting that we’ve synthesized substances that can help, from time to time, in different doses for both adults and children, take the edge off in a way that doesn’t throw you off track? To me it seems more honest this way, more grown-up, and less likely to rouse our collective inner voices into an anxious chorus constantly wondering what’s “wrong” with us.

The argument against this pro-enhancement mind-set, of course, is that it breeds addiction. Though to refute this, one need only look at a fact D.A.R.E. counselors hate to admit about illegal drugs — that most people who do them never become addicted, that many people smoke pot and do coke much the way they “drink responsibly,” and for many of the same reasons (relaxation, focus, confidence boosting) that people ask their doctors if a variety of pills is right for them. Really, it comes down to whether we want to view lifestyle pharmaceuticals as something indulged in passively or actively — a healthy reinvention of adulthood or a submissive rejection of the difficulties and responsibilities that come with growing up. There are no easy answers here, but until these questions are the ones brought up on the “Today” show — instead of the dog-and-pony act of whether the drugs are being “abused” — we are, as a psychiatrist might say, in a state of denial.

All of which brings me back to high school, to those days of petty dealing. Here’s how I came into my Ritalin stash in the first place: One afternoon, a girl came up to me while I was smoking a joint behind the auto-shop building and proposed that, in exchange for some Ritalin, I give her some pot. “My parents made me test for ADD so I could do better in school,” she said, “but it’s bullshit and the Ritalin makes me all tweaky. I don’t need it, so I just pretend to take it, to make my parents happy. Yeah, they’re total freaks. Anyway…” The girl was one of these naturally well-adjusted types who longs to be maladjusted, the sort who shellacs her scalp with Manic Panic hair dye while listening to Green Day bootlegs in order to mute the prescient knowledge that, in a few years, she’ll be practicing corporate law and calling Ansel Adams a madcap genius. I guess she wanted to impress me by seeming nonchalantly badass, because in exchange for a dime sack of what was essentially stems and seeds, she gave me an entire year’s worth of Ritalin.

What to do with it? I had no clue. Back in the dark days of 1995, the idea that “everyone had ADD” was already well ingrained in our cynical minds. But pill popping wasn’t yet so common among suburban teenagers, and at least among my friends nothing seemed less cool than doing a drug to be able to do your homework, the very thing we took drugs to forget about. The only kid I knew who’d played around with Ritalin recreationally was the brother of my sixth grade girlfriend, a scrappy numbskull who even at age 12 was a cautionary tale of what not to become. “Dude, it’s awesome,” he told me when he found out I was sitting on a pile of Ritalin, adding, as if this were a good thing: “My nose won’t stop bleeding!” One day I heard that college students were paying for Ritalin. I abandoned the idea of experimentation and went into business.

All of which would be a classic tale of teenage deviance if it didn’t so closely resemble what the doctors of America are now calling a medical advance. The people coming to me, with their fidgety frontal lobes and desire to get ahead, were young adults whose doctors, back in the square ’90s, would have questioned their motives had they asked for some Ritalin. So they relied on me, the kid who felt like a grown-up selling them drugs. Today, meanwhile, they’d likely be able to find a physician to supply what back then only a high school dealer could, though only under the rubric of diagnosis, of acknowledging that something is “wrong” with them. This is what we’re calling progress? Seems we have a ways to go.

In most cases our impressionable hero grows up, loses his acne, discovers the Rolling Stones, has sex, entertains more active passions than pop music obsession, and though he’ll always dig the Beatles — who doesn’t? — the band will never again be the deity it was in his youth. But there are the exceptions: the eternal 14-year-olds who grow up to write biographies of rock bands, devoting their adult lives to addressing those juvenile basement quandaries with scholarly gloss. Who are these guys? And, dude, how’d they do that?

Enter music writer Bob Spitz: onetime manager of Elton John and Bruce Springsteen, author of books on Bob Dylan and Woodstock, professional boomer sentimentalist. In his new “The Beatles: The Biography,” Spitz devotes 856 pages of retina-impairing text to asking the question of how the Beatles did what they did. The more pressing question, however, may be whether this book is really necessary. As Spitz acknowledges, there have already been hundreds of books written about the band, ranging from fawning fandom drivel to self-serving pseudo-exposés to perfectly decent histories like Hunter Davies’ authorized “The Beatles,” published in 1967, which Spitz uses as a primary source. And there will, of course, be hundreds more penned over the years: new theories floated about John and Yoko, about the firing of original drummer Pete Best, about the “true” origin of those hairstyles, about what it’s really like to be the pool cleaner of Paul McCartney’s great-grandchildren.

In fact, alongside Spitz’s book, recent weeks have brought the publication of “John,” by Cynthia Lennon (John by John’s first wife); “Lennon Revealed,” by Larry Kane (John by dubious journalist); and “With the Beatles,” by Lewis Lapham (John and band by the eruditely pugnacious Harper’s editor, who reports on their infamous 1968 meditation vacation in India). Reading these books back-to-back provides a case study in the shortcomings — if not the all-out impossibility — of attempting to illuminate on paper what makes pop in general, and the Beatles in particular, so perennially seductive.

Spitz, of course, would shudder at the idea of being grouped as another featherweight alongside the gossips, the hacks, the cultural critics, the money-motivated ex-lovers. He aims to be not merely another barnacle suctioned to the belly of the beast, but the barnacle, who, in the process, has created a beast of his own. The press materials accompanying the book include an interview in which Spitz boasts of handing in a first draft at 2,700 pages, as if warning Robert A. Caro to watch his back next time he’s strolling through Barnes & Noble. In Spitz’s mind he has spent the past eight years writing what he sincerely believes to be “the” Beatles book, a biography-as-black-hole that consumes all that attempts to come near it.

Mission accomplished? If “definitive” means producing a work as clumsy as it is ambitious, as flat is it is evocative, as stultifying as it is entertaining, then without question Spitz has succeeded.

Spitz has said that for a model he looked to David McCullough, who takes a historical novelist’s approach to writing historical nonfiction. McCullough is a master at fusing heroic bouts of research with a knack for storytelling, creating rollicking, Dickensian biographies that teem with eccentric personalities and lush descriptions of a pre-televised world. Inspired by this technique, Spitz sets out to deliver the Beatles as historical epic rather than pop cultural phenomenon. He prefaces John Lennon’s birth, for instance, with an eye-glazing microhistory of Liverpool’s shipping industry, as if the immaculate conception of the Beatle were somehow part of the city’s industrial evolution. The result is often as cumbersome and hyperbolic as it is informative. But the real issue with applying the McCullough method to the Beatles is far simpler: 1966 isn’t 1776, and John Lennon isn’t John Adams.

This isn’t to diminish the accomplishments of the Beatles just because they didn’t, between songwriting and touring, create the framework for an entire nation. But unlike the Founding Fathers, the Beatles have been documented ad nauseam in movies, documentaries, interviews, concert footage, recorded recording sessions — forces that conspire to render the biographer’s florid incantations of the past superfluous. It says something that while Kane’s “Lennon Revealed” is an unreadable, bottom-feeding study in journalistic desperation, the DVD it comes packaged with — an uncut interview Kane conducted with John and Paul from 1968 — is a fascinating glimpse into the tense chemistry between the two frontmen shortly before they went their separate ways. Maybe the image we have of the Beatles is mythologized spin — they are, after all, a rock band — but nonetheless it’s anything but blurry. To be able to cut through the mediated glare and introduce the boys as something fresh requires a level of skill that appears to be just out of Spitz’s reach.

Spitz is a perfectly capable writer; the trouble is that he has habit of posing as a great one. And so what could be said in one page is said in 20, often in clichi-speckled language that’s meant to enhance the narrative but instead buries it under the sort of prose that turns writing teachers into alcoholics. His concert scenes are soporific showcases in which the audience “didn’t know what hit them” and, afterward, “nothing was ever the same.” The ’50s and ’60s are presented with the Technicolor earnestness of a PBS documentary. A contributor to the New York Times Magazine, Spitz approaches the book as if it were one biblically long magazine article, treating the reader to countless anonymous quotes from “former acquaintances” and “classmates” that ultimately tell you nothing except the fact that Bob Spitz tracked down a great many people with dim Beatles recollections and zero interest in seeing their names in print. It’s one thing to be a fastidious researcher, but you can’t expect a reader to trudge through nearly a thousand pages if you don’t use that research to deftly re-create moments with a sense of immediacy. There’s no question that Spitz has produced an indispensable reference for Beatles obsessives — the book touches on everything from John’s losing his virginity to his dabbling with heroin, from their early days in Hamburg, Germany, to their final sessions at Abbey Road — though even the most loyal fan may find himself longing, at various intervals, for the PowerPoint version.

Which is a shame. Every now and then you get glimpses of a streamlined, better structured, more precisely written book hiding somewhere between the covers and waiting to be coaxed into life. Take Spitz’s portrait of the Beatles’ first arrival in America and their press conference at Kennedy airport: It’s expert — you feel as if you’re there alongside a young Nora Ephron (writing for the New York Post) and Tom Wolfe, being charmed by the mop-topped rascals. Spitz is terrific when it comes to deconstructing how various deals by people purporting to have the band’s best interests in mind were designed to exploit the Beatles. Most compellingly, he breaks down how the press reacted to the band: earnestly embracing their fables without ever prying too deeply into their personal lives. (John Lennon managed to hide the fact that he was married for years because — get this — journalists respected his wishes to keep his marriage private.)

The subtext of much of Spitz’s book is that we won’t ever have another Beatles for the same reason we won’t ever have a president as iconic as John F. Kennedy: The press won’t allow it. Today the media is far more interested in killing our idols — or at least pointing out that they too go grocery shopping and get cold sores! — than supporting them. In the ’60s, World War II and the Korean War were still smoldering memories. Optimism could sell newspapers the way only cynicism can today.

Feeling nostalgic? Don’t. Cynicism may rob us of us certain pop ephemera, but it produces more compelling journalism, and fortunately not every writer who covered the Beatles was smitten with the band. When Lewis Lapham was sent to India to write about the Beatles for the Saturday Evening Post, he was a young, uniquely skeptical reporter who didn’t get what the fuss was all about. “I didn’t rate myself an informed or fervent fan,” he writes in “With the Beatles,” a sliver of a book chronicling his stay at the meditation compound where the Beatles spent four months, along with Mia Farrow, Donovan and the Beach Boys, “studying” with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, founder of the Transcendental Meditation movement. The Maharishi was viewed even then as a huckster, a commodifier of spirituality for celebrities, the messiah with a publicist who paved the way for the Kabbalists currently schmoozing with Madonna. Or, in Lapham’s words: The appeal of the Maharishi was “characteristic of bored rich people suffering from a surfeit of milk and honey.”

At just over 100 pages, Lapham’s travelogue is charming but slight, and best read as a delicious footnote (and much-needed antidote) to Spitz’s book. Lapham presents the Beatles in India as social comedy: the beginning of Western pop culture’s suspicious fascination with the East. Unlike Spitz, Lapham’s touch is light and detached, his eyebrow perpetually raised, his command of language far more scrupulous. He sees the Beatles as a curiosity, not a revelation. And yet, ironically, it’s Lapham who manages to etch the more evocative portrait of the band members: the way they interacted both as individuals and as a collective, the way it may have felt to spend some time around them.

Perhaps the greatest shortcoming of Spitz’s gargantuan effort is that the actual boys of the Beatles never quite emerge as anything more layered than the stock characters we know and love. John is the volatile peacenik. Paul is cute but slyly cunning. George is quiet. Ringo is goofy but — sit down for this — not as goofy as you’d think. Even Cynthia Lennon’s “John,” composed with the stilted prose that smacks of a ghostwriter, is more effective at conveying how the Beatles affected the people closest to them. Her still-tortured self is like a negative image of John’s personality. Meanwhile, in Spitz’s book you are told a great deal, but shown very little. Most frustratingly, you never get any sense of exactly how the famed Lennon-McCartney songwriting process worked, except that it came to them so easily that, on one occasion, they ducked off into a corner for a few minutes and hashed out a song (“I Wanna Be Your Man”) for the Rolling Stones.

But maybe it’s unfair to expect Spitz, or anyone, to be able to elucidate something as elusive as how pop music happens. As an art form, pop is a paradox: elementary but complex, obvious but evasive, an outsider creation embraced by the populace. It makes perfect sense, and yet it makes no sense. It is the precise opposite of an 856-page book. The Beatles were unique in that they managed to inspire such innocent fervor while being genuinely innovative, the equivalent of the Backstreet Boys morphing into Radiohead. Who are these guys? How’d they do that? In trying to get to the root of these questions, Spitz incidentally exposes what makes them so compelling — that if they could actually be answered, they wouldn’t be worth asking in the first place.

Recklessly, stupidly: I use those words with affection, with the hope of preserving some of what New Orleans was before Katrina submerged it in water, tore it up, devastated it. More naively, I’d like to think that the city I’m describing here is not gone, that if I talk about it in the present tense, a version of what I’m sketching will reemerge in the weeks and months to come, once the streets are dry and the bodies are collected and the looting has stopped and the troops have gone home and the rebuilding process begins — once civilization can get back to denying the ever-present chaos of nature.

Loving New Orleans is — I cannot say was — a masochistic act, like devoting your life to a woman who has told you upfront she plans on leaving you. Tell a local you adore the city, are thinking of moving there, and you’ll be greeted with a deluge of warnings, reasons to reconsider. The city is dangerous, backward, corrupt, shiftless, a killer of momentum and personal integrity. Also, it’s sinking. Like Venice, it makes exactly zero sense, which, of course, has always been the appeal: the macabre decadence, the unnerving darkness, the flickering gas lanterns, the feral smell of moss and liquor everywhere, and those repulsively huge, prehistoric roaches skittering around your feet at night. When you live in New York you tend to be arrogant about other cities. They’re too small, too similar, soulless, corporatized, fake, irrelevant, dead.

I had imagined New Orleans as a city with striking architecture, sure, but other than that a mosh pit of everything that embarrasses me about America: binge drinkers, breast flashers, bead grabbers. What I found instead, and hope to convey to anyone who has never been there, was a place that has something few cities in America possess anymore: a pulse, a fever, an identity all its own. This is because New Orleans is, to paraphrase a statement popular among locals, an un-American city that happens to be in America, third-world shrapnel lodged in the belly of the first world. If this sounds to you like a crude, insensitive description of the city, all I can say is that clearly you haven’t been there.

Anyway, Lacey’s message. Oh God. At the moment it came in, the last I’d heard about Katrina was that it was terrible, yes, but not nearly as terrible as predicted. There were no toxic floods. Houses stood. People were alive. In my mind the levees, which had broken a few hours before, still held. I texted back: What’s going on? Absurd as it sounds, having such a dire conversation through the pop communication of text-messaging was oddly poignant, the privacy of the exchange resonantly personal in the midst of so much overwhelming clatter. This was not the newspaper. This was not a 24-hour news channel, repeating the most horrid images imaginable, feeding collective fear and pretending that prefacing doomsday predictions with the word “unconfirmed” is somehow journalism at its noblest. This was a person I knew pressing buttons on a barely functioning phone — a person who had just realized she had lost her home: It’s really gone. And I don’t know what to do or where to go. We’re all feeling displaced…

Lacey is 20 years old, a tiny, charmingly enigmatic, big-hearted girl from Tupelo, Miss., where her father runs the hardware store where Elvis bought his first guitar. She takes any stereotypes of small-town Southerners (so popular in my New York world) and reduces them to piecemeal. With no syrupy accent, she’s an NPR groupie, a Kundera junkie who is happiest when holed up somewhere alone, listening to music and making whimsical, ethereal paintings (one of which hangs in my living room). In New Orleans she worked at Café Luna, a coffee shop on Magazine Street. She is a student at Loyola — was a student I should say, given that Loyola, like Tulane, is underwater and shut down for at least a semester — who was set to start her first year as a junior the day Katrina hit. Today she finds herself part of a diaspora of up to 100,000 students who now have no school, no more certain road into adulthood, a predicament nowhere near as dire as those without homes, without insurance, with dead or missing loved ones, but they are experiencing a raw sense of being uprooted all the same. They are young during a time when to lose, say, a semester of school seems to mean being permanently relegated to the second tier of generational progress. They will be among the first to get on their feet, of course, but for the time being they are among the lost.

“Do you have any idea what we should do?” Lacey asks when I finally get through to her. She has gone to Mississippi, is staying at her father’s house with three friends, trying to figure out their future. When the news of the hurricane first came they were morbidly thrilled, the idea of life being put on hold, momentum frozen. Lacey talked about road trips — New York, maybe, or California, where she’s never been. They would become vagabonds, transients. But now that it’s all real, there is nothing amusing about it. Their apartments are very likely ruined. They don’t want to linger. They want to start over as soon as possible. “God, it’s so crazy,” Lacey says, sounding anxious but resigned. “I have no idea what I’m going to do. I mean, will other schools even take us? Do you know anywhere I can work?”

Without going into too much detail about what led me to New Orleans, I’ll simply say that it is — again I refuse to say was — a terrific city for curing a mild nervous breakdown, especially if you have impossibly generous writer friends willing to lend you an apartment in the Quarter. In the summer the city is a furnace, populated only by the very poor and the very hardcore, all of whom spend the days chasing shade, and nights wandering around sweaty, glassy-eyed, psychologically unhinged. It can feel a little bit like an asylum, in a good way, a purgatory between the best and worst reality has to offer. I didn’t know anyone in town, but on my second night I ended up drinking with Lacey and her friend Matt Newman until it was 6 in the morning and none of us could remember our middle names.

Matt is 21, grew up in Ohio, has long brown hair, Buddy Holly glasses, a sardonic sense of humor. He wants to be a movie director, and I believe he will become one. In the meantime he had just gotten a job at the Virgin record store. That first evening of drinking — Abita Ambers at Molly’s on Decatur Street — was the sort of slurred and dragging night so easy to have in New Orleans, where you wake up with fewer brain cells but more friends, so everything evens out. In the weeks that followed, Lacey and Matt helped make New Orleans real for me, a home. We played pool at a bar called Cosimos, ate catfish and squash at Lacey’s small apartment uptown, went to the movies, drank, and laughed cynically over horror stories of our parents’ divorces.

From a mass e-mail Matt sent out the other day from Lacey’s house in Mississippi: I’ll be looking for school or work or both sometime soon, so if anyone has any suggestions or brilliant ideas for the wayward, homeless student, I’m open to any and all suggestions. The important thing is, I’m OK. I’ve got my car, I’ve got my laptop, and I’ve got about four T-shirts. Keep your fingers crossed for the poor thousands of people that are stuck in the city now. Thanks to everybody who’s written or called in the past few days, it’s nice to know people are thinking about me…

Two days after I first spoke to Lacey, she and Matt are driving north, through Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, up through Illinois to Chicago. The windows are down. The music is loud. The drive takes 10 hours. They are with their friends Sean and Willimenia, fellow students, hoping to enroll in Loyola in Chicago. Loyola is a Jesuit school, girded by the indisputably noble philosophy, regardless of what you think of organized religion, that you help your brothers and sisters when they need help. All Jesuit schools have agreed to take in Loyola students. “We’re 30 miles away,” Matt tells me over the phone, sounding not so much thrilled as wary, still disbelieving his new reality. He tells me about some people they knew in Chicago, friends of friends, which is a start. They have a place to crash for the night, maybe even a week. I tell him that sounds like a plan. He says he’s a little nervous, but knows everything will work out.

“Oh, want to hear something funny?” I say.

“What’s that?”

I tell him that I’m sitting in the garden of DBA, a bar on First Avenue in the East Village — same owners as the DBA on Frenchmen Street, in New Orleans, where we spent quite a bit of time pretending to know about exotic beers. The interior, I say, is exactly the same. Matt laughs. He says that’s fitting. I hear him tell Lacey, who’s in the passenger seat, and I hear her laugh too. And just then, for a fleeting false second, the city still exists.

But five years on and let’s be real: Isn’t this starting to feel tiring, repetitive, cloying, misguided, weird seeming? One of the many pleasures in reading “How We Are Hungry,” Eggers’ recent collection of stories, is that it reminds you of his abilities as a writer. He can dazzle, and at his best he can move effortlessly between classic storytelling and the more experimental. There’s a sense of maturity to the book, and so it seemed like a fine time to check in on the author — to talk about the collection, about how his attitude toward writing and publishing has changed since 2000. (For some reason, if only because Eggers is the sort of person who tends to inspire assumptions, it feels relevant to state that we didn’t know each other before I interviewed him, though I have written for the Believer.)

In conversation Eggers is funny, chatty, uninhibited, and a true master of the extended tangent. We had a long telephone conversation, very long, probably much longer than either of us realized, one that took place with Eggers driving, then talking in a parking lot for another half hour. Among the topics discussed: Eggers’ take on short fiction, his adaptation of “Where the Wild Things Are” for Spike Jonze — and, yes, the culture of McSweeney’s and the culture that’s chosen to define itself in opposition to it.

One thing I’ve noticed about your stuff lately is that you seem to be willing to just put it out there at various stages and see how it sticks, which is something I think a lot of writers fear — exposing the machinery before it’s running smoothly. I guess I’m thinking of the novel in installments you were doing for Salon, and didn’t you republish your novel “You Shall Know Our Velocity” with a different name ["Sacrament"] and ending?

No, it had a different middle, actually. Just some punctuation changes toward the end. But, yeah, the big difference was that I was not always that guy. I had become really precious. I was a terrible freelancer. Magazines would hate me because I’d take some assignment and then I would freeze up, because I’d be like, “Well, they’re not going to print it the way I want it to be. What am I doing? I shouldn’t have taken this stupid assignment in the first place! It’s never going to be as good as it should!” And then I would just obsess forever and then when it was due, I would back out. I did that probably a dozen times. And then after that first book ["A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius"] came out, I froze up even more because I thought, “Oh, shit.” It becomes a lot harder. I wrote on my own for about a year and a half and came up with a 600-page book that I never published. It was good for me to write — I don’t think anyone else would be interested in it. It was after “Velocity” that I really started loosening up.

Steve [Elliott, author of "Happy Baby," which Eggers edited] has been somebody that’s been important to me in terms of a colleague whose work I like a lot, and he doesn’t overthink everything. He doesn’t overthink stuff from a publishing or career aspect. Also, I need deadlines, just like everybody else, especially coming from magazines, newspapers, and stuff like that. I need daily or weekly deadlines to get stuff done, or I continue to do things and not go off on a year of unproductivity.

Unproductivity — that’s not something I’d think anyone would associate with you. You seem to always be doing a million things. You’re doing a book on teachers’ salaries now, a biography of a Sudanese refugee, a compilation of prisoners’ oral histories — among others. To sound momentarily like the little old lady who lurks in the back of every reading everywhere, what’s your workday like? How do you fit everything in?

It goes in little patches. I’ve always written really late at night. Like the first book, I never started writing till [my brother] Toph went to bed. It got to the point where I would start writing at midnight and I would write until four, so I’m used to working kind of odd hours or working late. Sometimes, when we [me and wife Vendela Vida] need to get writing done, we’ll spend a month away somewhere without a phone.

I have this thing where in order to feel productive I have to feel like I’m procrastinating — so I’ll take on a bunch of work, even stuff I don’t really want to do, just so I have an excuse to put it down and pick up something else…

Yes! You said it way better than I could. It’s been that way for me basically forever. I was thinking about writing “Heartbreaking Work” the whole time that we did Might magazine –and that, for me, was competing with my time to maybe write that story out. And then I worked for Esquire for a year and I was supposed to be writing there but all I was doing was working on the memoir, for the most part. And then while I was stalling on that, that’s where McSweeney’s came from. I thought, “Fuck that, I haven’t published anything and I don’t know where I’m going with this memoir, but I have this idea for a magazine!”

You only want to work on the stuff you’re not supposed to be working on. That’s how it always is. I’ll always be working on five things at once, usually with those documents open at the same time because if I get stuck somewhere I’ll jump over to something else. That’s how my head has always worked. I don’t know if it’s ’cause I watched too much TV as a kid or what. It really could be that.

Since you’re your own publisher, I’m curious about who edits you.

Vendela, my wife, is probably the first person that reads things. And then Eli Horowitz, our managing editor — those are probably the two main people. I don’t know if you ever do this, but I’ll pick people for certain stories and I’ll say, “If this one doesn’t make sense to you, I’m doing something wrong.”

The classic line about the short story is that it’s nothing what it used to be, that it’s on its last leg as being culturally or literarily relevant or whatever. Anyone writing professionally knows how hard they are to sell — to magazines, and especially as books — that the whole machinery, except MFA programs, discourages them from being written. It’s all about the novel — and long novels in particular. I guess maybe that’s why I like a lot of the shorter pieces in “How We Are Hungry,” which I want to talk about. Maybe I’ll sound like an ass saying this, but they were quick and fun, which I think is kind of rare.

Thanks. You know, it’s funny: I was in Minneapolis the other day and I did a morning NPR show. There was a substitute radio host who interviewed me — I’m not sure where the regular person was. This substitute person wasn’t incredibly in touch with what’s going on in contemporary books, but she was nice enough, until the end. The last question — it’s like how they teach journalists to hold your tough questions until the end — so the last question is, “Do you think that some of these stories that are very short … well, what would you say if I said I kind of found them sort of gimmicky?” This woman felt very, I think, alienated, like the stories weren’t for her and they made her feel old or unhip.

I just didn’t know where to start. I keep thinking we’ll wake up someday and everyone will remember that every memorable piece of art we’ve ever had surprises us in its form. Part of it is the assumption that you’re not supposed to have fun with the short-story form. [Laughs.] It should not be fun, they say. Gertrude Stein died in 1946 or something, and yet I print a story that’s seven blank pages ["There Are Some Things He Should Keep to Himself"] and people throw up their hands in exasperation.

What’s the deal with that story, anyway?

There was a story there, seven pages, until a few weeks before we went to press. And it was a very personal and painful kind of story, and I thought it fit in the collection. But then I was advised that it wasn’t such a good idea to put it in, and so instead I changed the title and left the pages blank. In a weird way it went from the most wrenching part of the book to what appears to be a quick gag.

I want to talk about the idea of funny: What annoys me is how on one hand it’s not cool if a book’s obviously trying to be funny — or it’s at least harder to get “respect” — and at the same time every book that gets critical respect is now described in reviews as “containing prose that’s both unapologetically serious and, at times, disarmingly hilarious” or whatever. I’ll read those books, and I’m always struck by how unfunny they are. Good maybe, but not funny. Do critics just have no sense of humor?

Yeah — well, it’s true that if you want to know what’s fall-down-laughing funny, there aren’t too many pundits who are going to recognize it. Sam Lipsyte and Jonathan Ames are duly recognized for being funny, thank god. But generally, there are really only about two or three truly funny books published any given year. I think the Jon Stewart book is really funny, partly because it’s totally reckless. I had no idea it’d be that reckless! That and the Onion — they’re funny because they’re unbridled; you just don’t know when they’re going to say “motherfucker” or just jump the rails in some way. That Jon Stewart book is one of the best books of the year, but it’s not going to win any awards.

When I was reading “How We Are Hungry” I was struck by something: It seemed less angry than your stuff in the past. I don’t mean to say that both “Heartbreaking Work” and “Velocity” were similar books, but they both felt fueled in large part by anger.

“Heartbreaking Work” is a really angry book in a lot of places. It was meant to be and I’m fine with it being that way, but I can’t really tap into that as much anymore.

What changed?

Well, there was a lot of solipsism to “Heartbreaking Work.” The book itself talked about that, about the self-centeredness of people that age. It was supposed to be an indictment of that, too — about how you’re 25 and you truly think your thoughts and your goals are the main engine that keeps the world turning. And that’s true and completely ludicrous at the same time. Anyway, I think that’s why so many first novels are either semi-autobiographical or baldly autobiographical, because at that age, you’re really trying to figure out your own sense of self and what you are and what you mean to the world. I think “Velocity” might have been a transitional book, and this book, I think, is inching to go further. I mean, outside of journalism, I didn’t even write in the third person until this collection.

Did you find that tough? Freeing?

I think in general it’s an effort — not an effort, but an inevitability that I’ve been moving further and further away from self-analysis and self-concern and just more into … I’m trying to put it in a way that’s not really corny. 826 Valencia [the tutoring center in San Francisco] was really born out of a feeling that I’d spent a good year and a half pretty much alone writing the unpublished book, and then “Velocity,” thinking what I was writing was so crucial to the world that I had to spend all this time just doing that and thinking about it, to the exclusion of all else.

We lived in Costa Rica for a while, then Iceland, and all the while we weren’t speaking English much, and we were just these people living in little shacks, writing books, without any contact with anyone, without any ties to the community. And living that way, you spend far too much time inside your own head. You’re really not re-energized with your connection to people and just how, I don’t know, soul-strengthening that can be.

I lost a bunch of people in my life in those years, between 2000 and 2003, a couple of suicides among them, and not that I wasn’t in touch with mortality before, but I became more so in terms of people my age. I had always advised my friends that were really depressed and directionless to try to direct some of that energy outward and get involved in other people’s lives and help people — to address the concerns and needs of people who are even needier than they. So many people I knew were just tearing themselves up and devouring themselves, full of regret and torment, and I had this theory, based on nothing, really, that they might be saved if they leave the house and use their educations and healthy arms and brains to help people who might need their expertise or energy. But it was weird, because I would always advise this but I wasn’t really taking the advice so much myself.

Tell me a little about how 826 Valencia started.

When we moved back to San Francisco — that was in summer of 2001 — right away we rented this building in the Mission District. We didn’t have 501(c)(3) status; we had nothing. We just sort of rented the building and started tearing it up. It was a mess when we moved in. I convinced a high school friend of mine, Barb Bersche, to move out, and she and Vendela and I just started getting this building together and buying computers and that kind of thing, without really any definite clue of what we were doing.

I had friends who were teachers in San Francisco, and we’d been talking about how we could get the writing community involved in the public schools on a pretty massive scale, and we had an inkling it would work. And personally, it was just an effort to get out of my head a little bit and be able to come home at night and talk about something other than my own writing.

I already know you’re going to hate this next question, but I feel it has to be asked. Let me put it like this: When I wrote that piece a while back in the Believer [dealing with the literary world's fetishization of youth], I ended up on a panel talking about it. Anyway, there was this notion that I was the “McSweeney’s guy,” as if I’d sat around a fire with you and [co-editor] Heidi Julavits concocting something, when the reality was I’d just pitched Heidi cold, and then wrote a piece. I guess what I’m getting at is the animosity that is, within the little world you were just describing, directed at McSweeney’s, and what your thoughts are about that.

Just a warning, it’s definitely not a subject I want to get too far into. It gets into crazy people, and it always puts me in a bad mood to talk about crazy people. I personally don’t ever hear much about people like your panelist friend, because here in San Francisco it’s a sort of ridiculously supportive atmosphere. What always cracked me up about some of the initial reaction by a few to the Believer was that here was this magazine that was designed to talk calmly, enthusiastically and intelligently about books, and some people were, I guess, threatened by that.

At the beginning, it was very much like the Believer was saying, “Hey everyone, let’s be a bit more mature and calm when we talk about books, and here’s some good stuff you might not have heard about.” And of course that got certain people even angrier.

It’s pretty funny, when you think about it, right? It’s like an anti-violence movement being crushed by military force. You can’t win, right? I think almost every writer in the world would hope that books would be always talked about with respect and civility and depth and seriousness. It’s not such a controversial position, when you really think about it.

A related, though less taxing question: What’s it like being your own publisher, in the sense that you have information, like how any copies you’ve sold, that many writers make a point of pretending doesn’t exist?

I’m going to call it a strange Victorian idea, that the authors are away somewhere in a château and all of the people are somewhere else down in the engine room, shoveling coal into the furnace. A lot of authors are like this, where they really want to be completely divorced from all of the mechanics and the making of the books and all that. And then there are those who are always at war with it and always feel like their publisher isn’t doing enough for them and they got screwed or whatever.

The problem is, some publishers won’t even tell you the truth. They want to keep it all mysterious. But I do adult seminars in San Francisco every month, where we have panels of published writers talking to aspiring writers, and I always make the point that the publishing business, at any level, is still a very gentlemanly business. It’s eccentric and still peopled by book-loving people, and the profit margins are narrow, and everyone’s overworked and doing the best they can.

In terms of the numbers, I think if the truth is out there for everybody, then everybody is a lot better off. It quells some of the misunderstanding that goes on. I’ve had so many friends that were published — and I think published well — and then they get really angry because they don’t even understand how it works and they think, “Well, my book about South American dog trainers in the 16th century only sold 4,000 copies, and it’s my publisher’s fault!”

That’s the thing with writing — the numbers are most often so dismal. It can be frightening, always worrying you’re not selling enough, that no publisher will give you a second or third shot. You don’t think that always staring the numbers in the face can have an adverse effect?

It’s true, we know all the numbers. There are only four people at McSweeney’s, so we all know how much money a book makes, how much it costs to print a book in Wisconsin, how much it costs to print a book in China, how much it costs to print a book in Iceland. We know how much of the cover price the bookstore takes, how much the distributor takes, how much it costs to ship a box of books to Canada overnight.

But it’s empowering, incredibly empowering, to know how it all works. If we didn’t know how it works, we wouldn’t be able to put out Stephen Dixon’s book ["I"] that no one else would publish, and William Vollmann’s book ["Rising Up And Rising Down," which is seven volumes and thousands of pages] that no one else would publish, because we know the numbers and we know how to figure them out to work for these authors and these strange projects.

OK, last question: So I understand you’re working on a film adaptation of “Where the Wild Things Are”?

Yeah, I’ve been working with Spike Jonze for about a year on the script. The movie’s in production, I guess you’d say. Maurice Sendak has signed off on the basic storyline we did. So that’s been really fun. I never thought I would write screenplays, in any form. I just sort of consciously avoided it with “A Heartbreaking Work.” Nick Hornby and D.V. DeVincentis wrote a screenplay for that. I really didn’t want to be involved at the time. But Spike is one of my favorite directors and “Malkovich” in particular is one of my very favorite movies. I don’t know how much detail I can or should go into about “Wild Things,” but it’s very — as you would expect from Spike — it’s not really what you would expect. It’s what Maurice wants for the book, but it’s very odd, too. I think I better go now. I’m in the parking lot.

What does that mean?

I’m standing in the parking lot of a mall. I called you on the way to the mall, then I got to the mall, and we were still talking. I didn’t want to go into the mall talking to you, because it’d be too loud. So I’ve been standing in the parking lot for the last half an hour. It’s kind of cold and…

Yeah, you should go inside.

And I look kind of suspicious out here, I think. People thinking I’m casing their cars.